Since 1987, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has provided support to other federal governmental agencies' speech research programs, and the university and industrial research communities, by developing, and implementing, test protocols, and reference test sets to provide quantitative measures of the progress of research accomplishments. For the 1998 broadcast news transcription tasks, NIST provided participants with a test set consisting of two 1.5-hour subsets, each of which consisted of randomly selected story-length segments, drawn from materials provided to NIST by the Linguistic Data Consortium. The article discusses various aspects of the 1998 transciption tests. Participation in these tests has provided a stimulating environment for productive technical discussions. The NIST-developed test protocols and test data sets have proven to be of inestimable value in the course of the development of the core speech and language technologies.